Frustrated. That’s the word Invicta FC president Shannon Knapp used at least a half-dozen times when I spoke to her on Sunday morning about what had gone wrong with the pay-per-view live stream of Invicta FC 4 on Saturday night. Not surprisingly, it’s also how you might describe the tenor of many of the Invicta-related tweets as fight night unfolded – or didn’t – for fans of the all-women’s MMA promotion.

Some said they spent a half-hour or more trying to get USTREAM to accept their payment so they could watch the event. Others paid for a stream that wouldn’t start or simply wouldn’t stop crashing in the middle of fights. Knapp heard about it all as it was happening – don’t forget, this is the fight promoter who gave her phone number out on Twitter – but neither Knapp nor her staff could get through to anyone at USTREAM to ask them what the problem was.

“There was no one responding,” Knapp told MMAjunkie.com (mmajunkie.com). “And people don’t get upset with USTREAM. They get upset with us because it’s our commitment and our word.”

On Invicta’s end, Knapp said, the set-up was the same as it had been for the previous three events. Same on-site streaming company, same production people. The only difference on the scene at Memorial Hall in Kansas City, Kan., was at the broadcast table, where retired fighter turned commentator Bas Rutten took the place of veteran announcer Mauro Ranallo (more on that later). Everything was in place for Invicta’s first voyage into pay-per-view territory. Everything except the ability to reliably accept payment and deliver the product in return.

“When people can’t pay, that’s a problem,” Knapp said. “And people wanted to pay. That’s an even bigger problem.”

Like she said, frustrating. The best laid plans of an upstart fight promotion, torpedoed by technology.

Give Knapp credit, though. When she saw that the paid streaming option wasn’t working, she instructed USTREAM to take down the pay wall and promised refunds to those who had already paid. She essentially gave up on the pay-per-view option – the one that was supposed to give Invicta the data it needed to prove something to potential TV partners – midway through the event. Instead of holding out hope that USTREAM would get it figured out in time, Knapp decided to give it away for free and abort the whole pay-per-view mission after it had only just begun.

That was the right call, but probably not an easy one to make. It’s the kind of situation where you have to choose which failure you’re more comfortable with. Knapp chose the one that would allow more people to see the fights, and without leaving others feeling gouged by a company they were trying to support. What else could she do, really?

From the beginning, Knapp has said she wants Invicta to be the fight promotion that’s small enough to care about every one of its fans. Big companies can afford the luxury of remaining distant and deaf to the complaints of individuals, but Invicta can’t. The fewer fans you have, the more desperate the need to keep each one happy.

In that regard, Invicta made the best of a bad situation on Saturday night, but now what? Knapp still isn’t sure, she said. The next event is targeted for April, and, Knapp said, “if we don’t have a [TV] partner by then, we’ll be streaming in some capacity, whether we’re giving it away or not.”

Now Invicta finds itself in a tough spot. It’s a company that has relied almost entirely on the power of the Internet. That’s where it plugs upcoming events, where it broadcasts its fights, where it exists. You could live in a Wi-Fi-less wonderland, talking on your landline phone with only the soothing background noise of cable TV to connect you to the outside world, and you’d still know about the UFC and Bellator, possibly Strikeforce (depending on your cable package), maybe even the alphabet soup of small-time promotions that air interchangeably on AXS TV. But without the Internet, you’d have no clue Invicta even existed. How is a company like that supposed to make money if it can’t do it over the Internet?

If anything, Saturday night’s setback might have crossed one more option off Invicta’s list. Pay-per-view streaming isn’t impossible, but it’s also not all that reliable. Even if you can get your product from the venue to the computer screens of fans, who wants to pay to sit around in front of their laptop all night? Maybe this is a generational thing, but to me it seems like the Internet might be where we go to watch one or two fights we may have missed, maybe hear an interview or read a story, but TV is where we watch our sports. That’s where all the good stuff happens. The Internet is where we gather to talk about the stuff that just happened. If Invicta is going to get in the game with the big shows, doesn’t it need to be on TV eventually?

Probably, and I think Knapp knows it. If she didn’t, you wouldn’t hear her say things like, “if we don’t have a [TV] partner by then…” This experience has to make her more eager to find such a partner, and Knapp did admit that Saturday night’s debacle “put a little more pep in [her] step” in terms of signing a TV deal.

“But if you act in haste and align yourself with a bad situation,” she added, “we’ve all seen what that does.”

But enough about the delivery, how about the product?

Assuming you found a way to finally watch Saturday night’s event, you were reminded of what Invicta had already established in its first three events: you can usually count on some pretty good fights. Bec Hyatt made for a game opponent in a losing effort against Carla Esparza in the main event. Alexis Davis and Shayna Baszler earned a “Fight of the Night” bonus in a bout that saw Baszler seemingly run out of stream and into a surprising third-round submission. 115-pounder Tecia Torres continued to impress with a win over Paige VanZant, who seemed far more composed under pressure than you’d expect from an 18-year-old fighter.

That’s all good stuff, though on a card with 13 scheduled bouts, you’re bound to have both hits and misses. This time around the broadcast kept playing up the number of finishes at the last Invicta event (a good thing, since 14 fights all going the distance would have made for a long night). Invicta 4 didn’t have quite the same luck. Of 13 fights, eight went to a decision. That’s not to say decisions are inherently bad – sometimes we seem to forget that many of MMA’s greatest fights were decided by judges – but it can drag down the momentum in an already lengthy broadcast.

Invicta pitched this card as a great deal in the aggregate, which it was. The women’s MMA landscape is such that you can rely on seeing so many of the knowns and the unknowns alike packed onto each card, if only because other opportunities to fight and get paid are still relatively rare. This was a card hit by injuries, and still it had plenty to offer in the end. But the problem with selling the whole package is that it usually means you’re lacking in stars.

Invicta needs some fighters who can separate themselves from the pack and become a draw unto themselves. There’s potential for that within the existing ranks, but it hasn’t happened yet. Right now Invicta is still going on the strength of the whole, rather than the drawing power of a few. That’s a refreshing change in some ways, but in an individual sport like MMA I wonder how long it can last.

Finally, a couple notes on the broadcast

A good play-by-play man is a little like electricity: You don’t realize how much you rely on it until it isn’t there. It’s a ubiquitous comfort you mostly forget about, then it disappears. Suddenly you’re walking around reflexively reaching for useless light switches, wandering through dark, silent rooms and wondering how the pioneers managed without microwaves.

That’s kind of how it felt to lose Mauro Ranallo from the Invicta broadcast. He was replaced by Bas Rutten this time around, who has plenty of broadcasting experience, but Rutten’s not a play-by-play guy. He’s the ex-fighter commentator, the one who gives you some technical perspective and entertains you along the way. He doesn’t do the heavy lifting of the play-by-play, and he never has. You put him together with Julie Kedzie and “King” Mo Lawal, who are also fighter-commentators, and what you have is a broadcast table without a career broadcaster.

I don’t mean that as a knock on this announcing team. Kedzie and Lawal have done fine jobs on previous broadcasts, and Rutten can always be counted on to be the loose cannon of any broadcast, sliding around in unexpected, entertaining tangents and occasionally smashing into things with full-speed exuberance. That can be fun, but you still need someone there to steer the ship. When that person isn’t there it becomes obvious in a hurry, even from a great distance.

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